The Study Of Using Games To Teach Chinese In Primary And Secondary Schools In South Korea

At present, the biggest issue in teaching Chinese as a foreign language is not theprocess itself, but the quality of the teachers that are doing it. It’s great that so manyindividuals today are choosing to teach Chinese. However the task of teachingChinese and teaching it as a foreign language is a difficult one, and many new teacherare often unprepared. Often at times new teachers come into the classroom and use amethod called PPP which is stands for Presentation, Practice, and Production. First,during the presentation, language items are presented the teacher. Next, during thepractice stage the teacher then reinforces the presentation, usually doing listen andrepeat where the students listen to the teacher then repeats what they say. Finallycomes the production which can be done in the form of a worksheet. Although thismethod can be productive, using it all the time can leave a foreign language class verydull. Also the students can develop a lack of interest, which is a common problem.One great way to cure a classroom of this is by using games to teach Chinese. Doingso helps students with cognition and creates an active classroom atmosphere. Whenone is using games to teach Chinese, students are more eager to participate, and whenparticipation is spread throughout the classroom students become more relaxed andless shy about speaking. When this happy learning environment has formed, there isno sense of conscious learning of the Chinese language. This way of learning thelanguage is more profound as it helps with retaining the key vocabulary and phrasesbecause the students are more focused. The great Confucius once said:"the man who knows as well, like it rather happy man”. Interest is the best motivation for learning.Thus, using games to help teach Chinese creates must interest with students. Therewas recently a questionnaire survey done in South Korea conducted by the CPIKprogram that was given to Chinese language teachers in the teaching program.Fifty-two Chinese teachers in primary and middle schools in the South Jeolla provincewere questioned and among them,80.8%Chinese language teachers had notgraduated from universities yet. With percentages so high it’s obvious that theproblem lies in the fact that there is a big lack of teaching experience. That also leadsto poor classroom management which then leads to a very chaotic classroom, if theydon’t have help from their Korean co-teacher. In the same survey268students fromprimary and middle schools were asked what their level of interest was for Chineselanguage class and66.8%of the students either answered "general", or even "no fun".Thus, the game teaching method can be effectively used in the study of Chinese in theclassroom. The purpose of this paper lies in, not only explaining how to implementgames in classroom teaching, it also goes through specific case analyses of usinggames while teaching the in classroom. Games are an excellent tool to reinforce alesson. There should never be a time that you choose to play a game with yourstudents merely because you have some extra time to use. Games should be present toaccomplish a goal and motivate students to develop and expand their abilities towardslearning Chinese.